In the exhibition The Art of Golf,the game has a brush with culture

There are really just a couple of reasons to go see The Art of Golf, which opens Feb. 5 at the High Museum of Art in Atlanta: to satisfy a passion for golf or a passion for art. Notably, this exhibition hits the sweet spot where the two intersect. Running through June 24, the show will move to three other locations, as yet unannounced, ending its American tour in the summer of 2013. A videotaped introduction by Sir Michael Bonallack and Jack Nicklaus draws visitors into the gallery to begin a journey that starts on the frozen ponds of The Netherlands, braced by a Rembrandt etching, and winds up somewhere in the general vicinity of Charles Schulz’s
drawing board. In between, the nexus of golf and
art is explored in ways as surprising as a putt
hanging stubbornly on the lip that suddenly drops.

The centerpiece of the exhibition is The Golfers
(or, if you’d prefer the full title, The Golfers: A
Grand Match Played over the Links of St. Andrews
on the Day of the Annual Meeting of the Royal and
Ancient Golf Club), the iconic 1847 Charles Lees’
painting depicting a game of foursomes and the
gambling that went with it. It’s the first time the
painting has been in the United States, and the
show has done a superb job of deconstructing it.
The masterpiece is accompanied by studies Lees
did of the various characters, 54 in all, and
marries some of them to parts of two poems
written by George Fullerton Carnegie, which
could well have been the basis for the painting
itself. Carnegie’s descriptions are sometimes
serious, on other occasions less so, as with this
about the match referee, Thomas Patton:

Short, stout, grey headed, but of sterling worth…
Good humour’d when behind as when ahead
And drinks like blazes till he goes to bed.

The real surprises spring from the unexpected
artists. One is Childe Hassam, a leading American Impressionist, whose 1922 Dune Hazard was
done late in his career, likely at Maidstone Club in

The Golfers (above)
makes its first
appearance in the
U.S., at Atlanta’s
High Museum,
along with work by
Andy Warhol and
Norman Rockwell
(far bottom).

East Hampton, N. Y., where Hassam, who by then
had achieved critical success, often played.

Perhaps more surprising is the George Bellows
painting Golf Course, California. Completed in 1917,
Bellows, whose politics swung decidedly from the
left, was not an artist you’d expect to be drawn to
golf. Yet, the rich, saturated colors of the landscape
are unmistakable, both to the artist and the golfer.

And there is also Nicklaus’ sitting for Andy
Warhol. It would be difficult to conceive of any
artist less interested in golf than Warhol,
commissioned to do the top 10 athletes of the
1970s, would have been. Posed with a wooden
club, Nicklaus sat for a series of Polaroids. At one
point, Warhol asked Jack to “move his stick.” To
which Jack supposedly replied, “It’s not a stick,
it’s a club,” and then turned to someone else in
the room and asked, “Does this guy know what
he’s doing?” Nicklaus, of course, remembers none
of this. But, it’s just so quintessentially Jack that,
if it’s not true, it ought to be. Golfer or no, Warhol
got the Nicklaus eyes right.

Work by Harold Edgerton, the MIT professor
who was the father of strobe photography, and
Norman Rockwell as well as a collection of Bobby
Jones portraits—there is more there on display
than can ever be covered here, which is why there
is a very good place to be. gw